DDR5 RAM Price Index: Dated $/GB at Newegg (Pilot)

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-08-12 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

DDR5 prices roughly tripled during the 2026 memory supply crisis, and the numbers that circulate are mostly screenshots without dates or methods. This page is the start of a dated, checkable record: a $/GB index for mainstream 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 kits observed at named direct US retailers only, with the method, the acceptance rules, every rejection reason, and the raw data published alongside the numbers.

That cohort boundary matters. It does not price 8GB DDR4 modules or DDR5 ECC UDIMMs, and it is not a general DDR4-versus-DDR5 buying verdict. Use the DDR5 buying guide for the platform and workload decision. Use the ECC home-server guide when the question is ECC UDIMM rather than ordinary consumer DDR5. Each price question still needs the exact capacity and memory class.

It is labeled a pilot because the index metric has an activation gate, and the gate status is printed here verbatim rather than worked around.

Compare the dated offers

A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit can appear under several timings. Compare the full part and CAS latency before treating two prices as the same kit. On October 10 the corrected basket contained four qualifying lines; the next capture used a different matching method. The October 11 correction record explains why some older CL30-labelled rows disappeared.

Recent qualifying observations

Collection status: Captures since September 26, 2026 read Newegg directly. The latest-capture block below names the latest one; check Newegg for current price and stock.

Latest capture, October 11, 2026 (UTC), method ram-usd-per-gb-newegg-direct-v4: 63 listings reviewed, 9 eligible offers, 9 of 12 tracked kits qualified; the index metric activates at 6, so the gate is open and a series row was written for this date. Every row carries verification_status: discovery_only and publish_ready is False: stock is the retailer page’s own flag at fetch time; exact variant matching is mechanical by title, not confirmed by a person.

Cheapest qualifying offer: $529.99 at Newegg (Corsair Vengeance 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30, 16.562 $/GB).

This block is rewritten by the capture script on every run; the dated commentary below it is not.

The table shows every qualifying offer from the three newest captures, oldest first, exactly as the collector recorded it — not just the cheapest row per kit. The complete CSV history remains available below the table.

Showing 17 of 414 observations from the latest 3 capture dates. Download the complete CSV history. The table is rendered from that file at build time.

On 2026-09-14 the block above began using the successful capture output, while the commentary below it is dated by hand. The sibling GPU price index and NVMe SSD price index launched the same day on the same collector and the same gate.

First capture (2026-08-12)

Superseded classification: the August 12–24 field notes below preserve what the original matcher reported. In the corrected file the lowest retained offer was $529.99 on both August 18 and August 24. On October 11, the public derivatives were rebuilt with an exact-CAS requirement after looser variants were found inside CL30-labelled lines. Use the corrected CSVs and the latest-capture block for current eligibility; the raw capture receipt remains unchanged for audit.

21 qualifying offers total across 3 kits, out of 546 listings reviewed. For historical scale, the Vengeance 6000 CL30 kit was a $95–110 street-price part through 2024 — the price history lives in the DDR5 buying guide — so the first capture’s cheapest accepted observation was roughly 4x that older range.

The next four successful capture dates held the same narrow model coverage. Two captures ran on August 13. The earlier 07:11 UTC capture reviewed 581 listings and retained 23 qualifying offers across three Corsair kit lines; the scheduled 14:03 UTC capture reviewed 538 and retained 26 across those same lines. Both had a $449.99 cheapest qualifying offer. The later run replaced the date-level evidence directory, but the earlier four-file capture survives in repository history at commit b9e56c1a. August 14 produced 24 eligible offers, August 15 produced 30, and August 16 produced 29. No August 17 capture landed.

The August 18 capture reviewed 583 listings and accepted 25 offers across the same three models. The cheapest qualifying offer moved to $459.99 at B&H, or $14.375 per GB. That is a real $10 move in the discovery set, but still not a broad market index: nine of the 12 tracked kit lines produced no row that cleared the public rules.

Six more daily captures followed. August 19 reviewed 590 listings and accepted 24, August 20 reviewed 616 and accepted 24, August 21 reviewed 680 and accepted 21, August 22 reviewed 624 and accepted 17, August 23 reviewed 716 and accepted 16, and August 24 reviewed 706 and accepted 16. The same three Corsair lines qualified every day. No fourth model line has produced a single qualifying row. Twelve captures in, that is still the whole story.

The $459.99 floor held for six days and then ended on August 24, though not in the way a price chart would suggest. The B&H listing behind that figure simply left the result set.

Of the 13 listings present on both August 23 and August 24, not one changed price. The new cheapest qualifying offer is $469.59 ($14.675/GB), a Corsair Vengeance RGB kit at Best Buy that was absent from the previous day’s set. The shelf changed. No seller repriced anything.

Read the preceding $469.59 as the original, superseded result. In the corrected August 24 observations, the lowest retained kit was a Corsair Vengeance at Central Computers for $529.99 ($16.562/GB). There were three distinct kit lines, too few for an index row.

That original leader carried a flag. Its model number is CMH32GX5M2B6000C38 — a CL38 kit — while the line it satisfies is labelled CL30. The second-cheapest RGB row is a C36 part. The line’s actual CL30 kits all sit at $619.99.

So the tracked line is mixing timings, and as of today the headline figure is set by the loosest of them. This is the same defect class as the RGB contamination corrected on August 21: a listing satisfying a line it should not. It is not corrected here; the rows stay as captured.

August 22 was the first capture with the plain Corsair Vengeance line free of RGB-titled listings, after the collector began rejecting excluded tokens. August 23 repeated it. August 24 made three. All seven of that line’s rows are non-RGB, and its cheapest clean offer has held at $479.99 ($15.00/GB) at Central Computers on the same listing for all three days.

That is the figure the 2026-08-21 correction identified as the line’s true non-RGB price. One capture showed the filter ran. Three show it holds. The lines price independently now, and no longer share a listing.

Accepted price history by tracked kit

Notes from the September 13 capture

These field notes use the matching rules in effect on September 13. Some listings described here did not survive the later exact-timing correction. Use the corrected offer file for a price attributed to a particular kit.

Gate status: 3 of 12 tracked kits produced qualifying offers on 2026-09-13, from 640 listings reviewed and 23 eligible offers, so the gate was closed and no sixth index row was written. ram-price-index.csv still ends at 2026-09-05. No capture ran from September 8 through September 12, so this reading follows September 7 by six days. Those days stay empty. The cheapest qualifying offer was $459.99 at Best Buy ($14.375/GB, Corsair Vengeance RGB).

The basket is back to three Corsair lines. Corsair Vengeance, Vengeance RGB and Dominator Titanium qualified. Nothing else did. Those are the same three lines that made up every capture from August 12 to August 24, before the August 29 method change let G.Skill part numbers count toward the module split and widened the basket to seven.

Both G.Skill lines still present on September 7 dropped out. Ripjaws S5 had been $595.99 at Newegg and Trident Z5 RGB $609.99 at Newegg. No allowlisted retailer carried a qualifying listing for either. Neither was seen to reprice on the way out.

Dominator Titanium moved for the first time in 22 captures. It was $649.99 at Newegg on all 21 earlier captures, from August 12 to September 7. On September 13 it was $674.99 at Newegg, up 3.8 percent. Same seller, same listing title. Nothing else changed.

The floor fell, and the kit under it is slower than its line. Vengeance RGB read $529.00 at B&H on September 7 and $459.99 at Best Buy on September 13. That is 13 percent lower. The new listing carries a “14% OFF” tag, and its title states CL38-44-44-96 on a line labelled CL30. We flagged that defect on August 24 and again on September 2.

Part of the drop is a discount and part is a looser kit standing in. It is not a market decline. At $14.375 per GB it matches the floor of August 31 and September 1, and it ends four captures pinned at $15.312. Plain Vengeance held $489.99 to the cent for a fifth capture, now at Best Buy, on a C36 kit.

One G.Skill listing came close, and it would not have opened the gate. Best Buy listed “G.SKILL Ripjaws F5-6000J3238F16GX2-RS5W” at $589.99. It was rejected for model_tokens_missing because the title never says S5, even though the RS5W suffix names the line. The rule read the prose.

The same part encodes CL32 (J3238) on a CL30 line, so accepting it would have added a looser kit and moved the count to 4 of 12. Six were needed. Trident Z5 RGB had no allowlisted row carrying its part. The $509.99 Newegg row under its query is a Trident Z5 6000 kit (-TZ5K), and its rejection was correct.

The excluded counterfactual got cheaper. The exact Flare X5 kit F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5 is $439.99 at Jawa.gg, down from $444.99, and $708.87 at MemoryC.com. Neither seller is on the direct-retailer allowlist, and both rows were rejected for seller_not_direct_allowlist alone.

At $439.99 the kit would be $13.750/GB, below every accepted observation in the downloadable file, including the $14.062 of August 12. The exclusion is deliberate, and the rule that keeps marketplace prices out of this index is still holding its floor up.

September 6’s apparent increase was the September 4 spec substitution running backwards. G.Skill Ripjaws S5 read $499.99 to $595.99, up 19.2 percent, and no seller raised a price. The part reverted: F5-6000J3636F16GX2-RS5K (J3636 = CL36) back to F5-6000J3040F16GX2-RS5W (J3040 = CL30). The 09-04 entry recorded the outbound leg of this same swap as a 16.1 percent drop and called it a spec substitution rather than a discount.

It has now round-tripped, to the cent and to the part number. That CL30 part has sat at $595.99 at Newegg on 2026-08-29, 08-30, 09-02, 09-06 and again on 09-07. Nine days, one price. This is the second reading this page published in advance and then saw confirmed, after the Trident Z5 attribution test. On 09-13 that listing was gone.

Read eight captures together. On August 31 the median fell while nothing got cheaper. On September 1 it held while a tracked kit rose 20 percent. On September 2 it rose 7.5 percent while three kits held flat and one fell 17 percent.

On September 4 it fell 8.8 percent while both cheap lines rose and the floor went up. On September 5 every figure held to the cent while three of the four listings at the floor vanished. On September 6 there was no figure at all and not one surviving line moved.

On September 7 there was still no figure, the same five lines qualified, and exactly one of them rose. On September 13 the basket shrank to three, the flattest line in the file finally moved, and the floor fell on a slower kit. Eight captures, eight different relationships between a headline number and its own basket.

September 6’s was the cleanest of them: a six-line gate over a shifting basket will close on availability alone, with every tracked price standing still. That is the failure mode this page exists to make visible, and why no row was manufactured to cover the gap.

Why it opened on 2026-08-30: the rule changed, not the market. The gate had failed on all thirteen captures from 2026-08-12 to 2026-08-29, reaching 3 of 12 and then 4 of 12.

On 2026-08-29 the module-split matcher was corrected (method ram-usd-per-gb-discovery-v1 to v2): it had accepted the marketing phrase “dual channel” as a statement of the 2x16 split while rejecting manufacturer part numbers that encode the same fact, such as G.Skill’s F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5, where 16GX2 means 16GB x 2. That is the manufacturer’s own encoding and is strictly more authoritative than the title prose, so refusing it was an inconsistency in what counted as explicit.

Three G.Skill lines qualified as a direct result and the model count moved 4 to 7. The bare word “Kit” was not accepted, because a “32GB kit” does not state its module count. Every series row carries its method_version, so v1 and v2 days are never silently compared.

What gets rejected, and why that’s the point

Of 546 listings reviewed in the first capture, 525 were rejected, each with recorded reasons: marketplace and third-party sellers (the largest bucket), listings that don’t state the 32GB capacity or the 2x16GB split in the title, wrong speed for the tracked SKU, used/renewed condition, and prices outside a sanity band. A price index built on listings a script guessed about would be smoother — and worthless. The rejection log ships with the dataset.

Method, exactly

The current method, first used on September 26, queries each tracked kit on Newegg and confirms the selected sold-by-Newegg item on its pinned product page. The row comes from ItemDetail: FinalPrice less a real shipping charge, seller, stock, new/refurbished/open-box flags and fetch time. Marketplace, refurbished, open-box, out-of-stock, wrong-variant and out-of-band rows are rejected. Stock and the mechanical title match are not independently verified.

The archived captures used Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API. That collection route is retired. The historical method used one exact-model query per tracked kit.

Under that historical method, an offer qualified only if the seller matches a named direct-retailer allowlist (Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center, Adorama, Walmart first-party, and peers — marketplace suffixes excluded), the title states the exact kit line, speed, 32GB capacity, and 2x16GB split (a “Dual Channel” declaration on a 32GB listing counts as the split), condition is new, and the USD price sits inside a $60–900 band.

The band’s ceiling was raised from $500 on day one when real direct-retailer offers at $469–499 for the cheapest kit proved the old ceiling was written for a market that no longer exists — that correction is in the change log.

Amazon is excluded by design (see FAQ). The full collector, product basket, tests, raw responses, and rejection logs are in the site’s repository.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

Download the corrected observations: ram-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer, with capture date, kit, price, $/GB, seller, and verification status. The October 11 exact-CAS correction is reproducible from the catalog and rebuild script; it removed only rows whose title and manufacturer part number failed the line’s timing requirement. Its machine-readable correction record publishes the before-and-after hashes, row counts and manufacturer sources.

The corrected daily index series publishes at ram-price-index.csv (median cheapest $/GB across kits, one row per UTC day, each row stamped with the method_version that produced it). The surviving dates are August 30, September 1 and September 2, each with six exact-CAS lines. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — attribute as “TechFuelHQ DDR5 RAM Price Index” linking to this page.

The same CSV is mirrored on Kaggle for discovery and reuse. This page remains canonical because it carries the gate state, method changes, and correction history beside the file.

Context for the crisis itself: the RAM & SSD price crisis explainer and the DDR5 buying guide — the guide’s price-tracking data is what earned this site its first external news citation, and this index is that work made repeatable.

Outside reference: US prices from Pricify

Change log

• 1.0.9 (2026-10-11) — exact-CAS correction. Manufacturer specifications identify October 10’s Kingston KF560C36BBE2K2-32 as CL36 and TeamGroup FF3D532G6000HC38JDC01 as CL38. The catalog now requires a maker-documented timing signature for every line. A tested deterministic rebuild filtered the public observations from 621 to 405 rows and the gated index from 17 to 3 rows. October 10 now has 4 of 12 exact-CAS lines, so the gate is closed. Raw capture receipts were not modified; older entries below describe the superseded classifier.

• 1.0.8 (2026-09-13) — twenty-second capture, six days after the last, since no capture ran from 2026-09-08 through 2026-09-12. 640 listings reviewed, 23 eligible offers, 3 of 12 model lines, gate closed for a third straight capture and now at half the minimum. No sixth index row was written and ram-price-index.csv still ends at 2026-09-05. Both G.Skill lines left, which returns the basket to the three Corsair lines of mid-August.

  Dominator Titanium rose from $649.99 to $674.99 at Newegg, its first move in 22 captures. The floor fell to $459.99 / $14.375 per GB on a Vengeance RGB listing whose title states CL38 on a CL30-labelled line. The excluded Flare X5 part fell to $439.99 at Jawa.gg.

• 1.0.7 (2026-09-07) — twenty-first capture: 640 listings reviewed, 20 eligible offers, 5 of 12 model lines, gate closed for a second straight capture one kit short of the minimum. No sixth index row was written and ram-price-index.csv still ends at 2026-09-05. The same five lines qualified as on 09-06. Four held to the cent and one rose.

  Corsair Vengeance RGB went $499.99 to $529.00, up 5.8 percent, ending the streak in which nothing in the basket got more expensive. The floor stayed $489.99 / $15.312 per GB for a fourth capture while the cheapest seller alternated between B&H and Central Computers. G.Skill Flare X5 was absent a second capture and still has not repriced; the $504.99 rows returned under its query were Trident Z5 parts (-TZ5K) and were rejected correctly.

• 1.0.6 (2026-09-06) — twentieth capture: 600 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 5 of 12 model lines, gate closed one kit short of the minimum after two captures sitting exactly on it. No sixth index row was written and ram-price-index.csv still ends at 2026-09-05. Four of the five surviving lines held their cheapest price to the cent, and nothing in the basket got more expensive.

  Availability closed this gate; no price did. The line that left, G.Skill Flare X5, had held $499.99 to the cent for six straight captures and never repriced — no allowlisted retailer listed the 32GB kit at all. That exact part sold at $444.99 at Jawa.gg, off the allowlist and excluded by design, which would have been $13.906 per GB and a new series low. The lone apparent increase, Ripjaws S5 up 19.2 percent, is the 09-04 spec substitution round-tripping back to its CL30 part. publish_ready stays False.

• 1.0.5 (2026-09-05) — nineteenth capture: 596 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 6 of 12 model lines, gate open at exactly the minimum for a second capture. Fifth index row: median $15.625 per GB, min $15.312, max $20.312, median cheapest kit $499.99 — every field identical to the 09-04 row, a first for this series.

  All six lines held their cheapest price to the cent, so for once the headline is not disguising movement underneath. What moved is depth: eligible offers fell 24 to 21, and the four listings tied at $489.99 on 09-04 became one. Trident Z5 RGB made the same Newegg-to-Best Buy swap that registered a 21.4 percent jump on 09-02 and held $609.99 to the cent, testing and confirming the shopfront-attribution reading. The floor is again set by a CL36 part on a CL30-labelled line, whose true CL30 part sits $60 dearer at the same retailer the same day. publish_ready stays False.

• 1.0.4 (2026-09-04) — eighteenth capture: 560 listings reviewed, 24 eligible offers, 6 of 12 model lines, gate open at exactly the minimum. Fourth index row: median $15.625 per GB, min $15.312, max $20.312, median cheapest kit $499.99. No capture ran on 2026-09-03, so this row follows 09-02 by two days, and nothing is interpolated across the gap. The median fell 8.8 percent while the floor rose.

  Trident Z5 RGB round-tripped to $609.99 at Newegg on the identical part, confirming the 09-02 entry’s shopfront-attribution reading. The largest apparent drop, Ripjaws S5 down 16.1 percent, is a CL30-to-CL36 part substitution rather than a discount. Both cheap lines rose. Two lines left the pool and three of the remaining six sit at exactly $499.99, so the median is a three-way tie. publish_ready stays False.

• 1.0.3 (2026-09-02) — seventeenth capture: 560 listings reviewed, 24 eligible offers, 8 of 12 model lines, gate open a second day. Third index row: median $17.125 per GB, min $14.675, max $23.147, median cheapest kit $547.99. The median rose 7.5 percent while three lines held flat to the cent, one fell 16.8 percent and a new cheaper eighth line joined; without that new line the median would have been $18.625.

  Two G.Skill parts swapped retailers in opposite directions at a spread of roughly 20 percent. The floor rose to $469.59 on the CL38-in-a-CL30-line listing first flagged on 2026-08-24. publish_ready stays False.

• 1.0.2 (2026-09-01) — sixteenth capture: 718 listings reviewed, 25 eligible offers, 7 of 12 model lines, gate reopened. Second index row: median $15.937 per GB, min $14.375, max $22.373, median cheapest kit $509.99. Median, minimum and median kit price all returned to the cent to their 2026-08-30 values while G.Skill Ripjaws S5 rose 20.1 percent on the identical part — the move sat at the top of the distribution, where the median could not see it.

  This entry was written on 2026-09-02; the 09-01 commit bumped dataset_version to 1.0.2 without recording the release here, the same omission corrected for 1.0.0 one day earlier.

• 1.0.1 (2026-08-31) — fifteenth capture: 680 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 5 of 12 model lines. The activation gate closed again one day after opening, and no index row was written. Same method (v2) on both days, so the rule-change caveat that framed the opening does not apply here. Two lines left the set and none joined, both of them the most expensive (Ripjaws S5 $595.99, Trident Z5 RGB 6400 $609.99, both Newegg).

  Four of the five surviving lines held price to the cent. The fifth changed seller at a steady price. Cheapest qualifying offer unchanged at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB, Vengeance RGB at B&H. The median $/GB fell from $15.937 to $15.625 with no kit getting cheaper. That is a basket-composition artefact, and the page does not present it as a move in price.

• 1.0.0 (2026-08-30) — fourteenth capture and the first published index row: 680 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 7 of 12 model lines against a minimum of 6, so the activation gate opened for the first time. Median cheapest $15.937 per GB, min $14.375, max $20.312, median cheapest kit $509.99, method ram-usd-per-gb-discovery-v2.

  It opened because the acceptance rule changed rather than because supply improved: the module-split matcher was widened on 2026-08-29 to read manufacturer part numbers such as F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5, which qualified three G.Skill lines and moved the count from 4 to 7. publish_ready stays False, because direct-retailer stock is still unconfirmed. This entry was written on 2026-08-31; the 08-30 commit bumped dataset_version to 1.0.0 without recording the release here.

• 0.9.7 (2026-08-24) — twelfth capture: 706 listings reviewed, 16 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines. The $459.99 run ended after six days when its B&H listing left the result set. Nothing was repriced. Zero of the 13 listings common to Aug 23 and Aug 24 changed price. New cheapest qualifying offer $469.59 / $14.675 per GB, Vengeance RGB at Best Buy.

  New flag, recorded not corrected: that listing is a CL38 part (CMH32GX5M2B6000C38) satisfying a line labelled CL30, whose true CL30 kits sit at $619.99. Plain Vengeance clean for a third capture, flat at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required lines.

• 0.9.6 (2026-08-23) — eleventh capture: 716 listings reviewed, 16 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB for a sixth day since Aug 18. The RGB exclusion reproduced on the plain Vengeance line: 0 of 7 rows RGB-titled, holding independently at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB on the same Central Computers listing as Aug 22. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required model lines.

• 0.9.5 (2026-08-22) — tenth capture: 624 listings reviewed, 17 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB since Aug 18. First capture with the RGB exclusion active on the plain Vengeance line: 0 of its 9 rows are RGB-titled (5 of 13 were on Aug 21), and it now prices independently at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required model lines.

• 0.9.4 (2026-08-21) — captures seven through nine (Aug 19: 590 reviewed / 24 eligible; Aug 20: 616 / 24; Aug 21: 680 / 21), the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB since Aug 18. Correction: the page prose was resynced to the capture the rendered table serves. The drift class the 0.9.2 entry named had recurred, because the daily collector updates the CSV but not this page.

• 0.9.3 (2026-08-18) — sixth successful capture: 583 listings reviewed, 25 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 qualifying model lines, and a new discovery-stage floor of $459.99 / $14.375 per GB at B&H. The activation gate remains closed; no ram-price-index.csv row was manufactured.

• 0.9.2 (2026-08-14) — day-three capture (24 qualifying offers, same 3 Corsair kits, cheapest unchanged at $449.99). Correction: the rendered observation table had advanced to the 2026-08-14 capture while the prose above it still described only days one and two, so a reader met a table dated later than anything the page acknowledged. The prose now names the capture the table actually serves.

• 0.9.1 (2026-08-13) — earlier of two day-two captures: 581 listings reviewed, 23 qualifying offers across 3 kits, cheapest unchanged. A later scheduled capture reviewed 538 and retained 26 qualifying offers; that later run replaced the date-level evidence directory and is reported above. The earlier four-file capture remains in repository history at commit b9e56c1a.

• 0.9.0 (2026-08-12) — pilot capture and method publication. Four method corrections made against measured evidence on day one, all recorded: price ceiling $500 → $900 (285 real listings died on the stale band); “Dual Channel” accepted as an explicit module-split marker (Newegg writes Trident Z5 Neo kits this way); per-product offer de-duplication (a Corsair offer was being consumed and mis-rejected under another kit’s query); basket v1.1 swapped two kits with zero direct-retailer presence (ADATA XPG Lancer, Patriot Viper Venom) for Dominator Titanium 6000 and Flare X5 5600.